Fair Speech is under attack (so is Free Speech, of course)
by His High Witness, The Prophet V.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY "FAIR SPEECH" INSTEAD OF "FREE SPEECH"?
FREE SPEECH is a bit of a myth. No system that organises itself sufficiently has "free speech" in an absolute sense. So we use the term "Fair Speech" instead. And by that we mean (for example):-
----The words we have every right to use are merely fair comment: an observation of some aspect of reality as we might perceive it AND do not carry dangerous, real world implications: e.g. by producing a legal document which tells people that all poisons are safe, rather than another kind of work where we ought not to expect that level of accuracy, or where we allow for some element of ambiguity: in anything from philosophical works through to creative poetry and prose......and of course, in religion itself!
----No proven harm has been demonstrated BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT by the words spoken.
----There is no obvious call to immediate direct action that can be PROVEN as harmful.
----There is generally (but not always) some notion - however limited - of TOLERANCE for the opposing view, and a willingness to give it space. Note that in our case, even though we advocate for a new theocracy, we CANNOT propose the kind of violence against other religions or ideologies that goes against our own religious rules, as this would be unethical.
SOME LAWS YOU NEED TO BE AWARE OF THAT HARM FREE SPEECH (AND FAIR SPEECH)
1. THE ONLINE SAFETY ACT
Under the Act, “service users” (think social media companies, publishers etc.) have a duty to take down content which is illegal or harmful to those percieved in loaw to be of a vulnerable age. Ofcom has been brought in as a regulator to ensure compliance, but it remains unclear how any of this can function in practice. While we have been told there’s no intention to read our personal messages, the government still admits there is at present no way to scan phones without breaking end-to-end encryption, and it reserves for itself the right to do so.
it is also creating a new “false communication offence” under s179(1) – this time addressing what may and may not be said in public, in addition to what is permissible in private.
The test for this offence has four elements:
---1] A person sends a message;
---2] The message conveys information which that person knows to be false;
---3] At the time of sending, the person intended the message (or the information) to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience;
---4] The person has no reasonable excuse for sending the message.
Some problems with all of this
For a start, how can ANYONE know for sure how to define absolutely what "falso information" is? Would holding a religious belief that is not approved of be deemed as false? Who defines what "non-trivial psychological damage" is? And who defines what a "reasonable excuse" is or is not? The whole thing is TRASH. And it's likely that those who devised the legislation KNOW that it's trash. But of course, that's not the real point of this law. It's to silence criticism of the state in keeping with the REAL aims of the Judeo-Capitalist Axis.
If all that wasn't bad enough, there is a widespread consensus that the definition of "reasonable defence" would be extended to social media platforms and content created outside the UK. According to one source: "The offence is particularly troubling because it also has extra-jurisdictional application, meaning that the sender need not reside in the UK to be prosecuted. This creates a difficulty, because American users of the same social media platforms enjoy greater protections to their speech, guaranteed under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, than UK users currently have under Section 2 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which transposes Article 10(1) of the ECHR into UK law."
2. THE 2003 COMMUNICATIONS ACT
This was the Act that introduced the UK and the world to OfCom. Before OfCom, the old-fashioned (and very British) way oof doing it used to be to encourage the media organisations to police themselves. Rather than change tack, it should simply have regulated this a little more closely. Although it makes sense in some ways to co-ordinate print media, broadcasting and the Internet under one framework, the outcome is far, far more draconian than we used to get from the old messy system of different regulators.
According to the Open Rights Group website, "Communications Act 2003 Section 127(1) covers offensive and threatening messages sent over a "public" electronic communications network. Since 2010 it has increasingly been used to arrest and prosecute individuals for messages posted to sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Section 127(2) covers causing annoyance by sending messages known to be false, which is one of the laws that hoax-999 callers can be prosecuted under.".
Again, we have the same problem as with the much later Online Safety Act. How do we know that a message is false or not, and WHO GETS TO DECIDE?!
- (c) 2025 His High Witness, The Prophet V -
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